[Masterclass] 3 - Getting Started: Creating Your First LinkedIn Ad Campaign

You're listening to LinkedIn Ads Radio, the podcast dedicated to exploring and mastering LinkedIn advertising, with your host, Anthony Blatner from Speedwork.

Hello Hello. Welcome to episode three of LinkedIn ads radio. This first season is a masterclass and today's episode will be a quick start guide on creating and launching your first LinkedIn ad campaign the Right Way So in the first episode we talked about B2B strategy with LinkedIn ads to equip you with your plan. And then in the last episode we talked about getting your LinkedIn profiles and organic site in order. So now that you have the building blocks of a strategy and your profiles are ready to go, let's build. In this episode we'll walk through the campaign creation process and the details there so you'll know how to best use each segment. Even if you've been through this process multiple times, maybe you'll pick up a tip or two. So very first step is creating your ad account. You can have multiple ad accounts for a company page. For example, large enterprises like Dell or IBM often have several ad accounts. These may be divided by company department or by country. So if you work for a large enterprise, you may consider planning if you need to divide accounts. Next, let's jump into creating your ad account in LinkedIn Campaign Manager. To get into LinkedIn Campaign Manager via LinkedIn. Com, go to the top right click the nine dots that say for Business and then click Advertise. That will help you in. Or you can navigate directly to LinkedIn.com CampaignManager accounts. Once you're in there, click Create and then click Account. Give your ad account a name, set the currency, and then link your company page. As you can see, each ad account can only have one currency and then must also have only one payment method when you get into the account. So that's one of the reasons that big companies often have multiple ad accounts to be divided by country and currency. They might also divide by payment method if it's different departments in a company using it. All right, so once you have your ad account, you'll be starting out in the Campaign Groups tab once you get inside of it. Campaign groups are simply a folder of campaigns at the moment. In beta right now is a campaign group optimization feature that would then allow groups to optimize budgets across multiple campaigns, similar to how Facebook's Campaign Budget Optimization CBO feature works across ad sets. Groups can be a useful way to roll up metrics from multiple campaigns, so you may choose to organize your groups by funnel stages such as Top of Funnel or Retargeting or you may choose to organize them by audiences or products or initiatives. I have one client that chooses to organize them by market and then each market has their set of different campaigns that they choose to run to each market. Keep in mind that draft campaigns can be moved between campaign groups, but once a campaign is launched in a group, you can't move it to a different group. It's there forever. So once you create your group, you'll then click into the Campaign level view. Here you'll click Create Campaign. Then you'll be in the campaign creation screen. First you'll see a quick setup or Advanced setup options. This is a relatively new feature, so maybe not all campaign all accounts have it yet, but if you're listening to this podcast and you want to get the best performance, you should probably select the Advanced view. At the moment, the Quick view limits your options and removes the options that we prefer to have, like bidding and advanced targeting. So after that you'll then name your campaign. I like to have a naming convention defined, especially if you plan to launch several campaigns. I prefer to have it include the audience offer objective and ad type in the campaign string, sometimes some additional information, but basically so I can know exactly what's in that campaign without having to open it. Next you move down to your campaign objective section. There's several different campaign objectives that LinkedIn offers, and in the screen here they divide it into the different funnel stages. They have awareness, consideration and conversions. But there are lots of different cases when we'll run different objectives at various stages of the funnel. The first one here under Awareness, is called Brand Awareness. And just like the name sounds, this campaign is good for raising brand awareness to your target audience. The description of brand awareness campaigns is I want more people to learn about my business. Choose this objective to tell more people about your product, services, company or LinkedIn event. The way that this campaign objective works is it optimizes for the cheapest cost per impression, so so it will serve your ads to the cheapest audience out there to give you the best prices. That's not to say it's going to serve it to only the lowest people in the audience to be the cheapest, but it's going to optimize for the cheapest cost per impression. This campaign objective does not have options for cost controls. So you're kind of at LinkedIn's mercy of what the cost is going to be and you won't really know that until you launch it. There's a lot of factors there involving the quality of your ads, the quality scores of your ads, and then the competitiveness of your audience. The unique thing about this campaign objective is it has a reach optimization that's not available anywhere else. So if you have a large audience and you want to make sure your message reaches everyone in that audience, that's the optimization that you want to be making or using so that you can reach everyone in your audience versus other objectives might focus on a subset of your audience that is going to be most likely to take the action that we're choosing and the conversion that we're choosing, whereas reach will drive towards everyone in your audience. Now, while brand awareness is listed in the awareness section of the objectives, it can also be useful to run as a retargeting campaign. When I want to make sure that I'm getting my message out in front of warm audiences to make sure that they're seeing all the different messages I want them to see, which might be various case studies, social proof and stuff like that. I might want to keep ads in front of them and run that at the cheapest cost per impression. It's okay if they don't click or go to my website every time, but I want to keep ads in front of them and, and make sure that they're getting those messages at the cheapest cost per impression possible. Next up is the website visits objective which is now in the consideration stage of the graphic on LinkedIn here. And it says I want people to visit a website destination site on or off LinkedIn. So you can choose this objective to drive traffic to your website, drive traffic to marketing landing pages, or drive Traffic to your LinkedIn event. Your campaign will be shown to people most likely to click on your ads. So you could buy the wording of this. You can tell that this is optimizing your campaign for people who are going to be likely to click on an ad and drive traffic to your website. For this objective you can bid by click, so you can only be charged by for each click on a CPC basis. You can also run it as maximum delivery as well or cost cap as other methods of bidding there. And when you choose the website visits objective, if you have the LinkedIn insight tag in your account set up and you have conversions already set up, then LinkedIn's going to suggest for you to choose the website conversions objective where you can then optimize for those conversions. There are some trade offs there. Website conversions tend to be more expensive clicks and you're kind of relying on how well the algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm is going to be able to Optimize for your conversions versus website visits are actually cheaper clicks to get compared to website conversions. So often if you're on a smaller budget then we recommend using website visits objective and bidding low. And then if you have a very large button but budget and are able to drive enough clicks and conversions for the algorithm to really kick in, that's where website conversions can perform better for you. Next on the list is the engagement objective on here, LinkedIn says I want more people to engage with my content posts. Choose this objective to increase social engagement with your content or LinkedIn event. Increase followers to your company page. Your campaign will be shown to people most likely to engage with your ad or follow your company. The benefit of this objective is that your ads, your sponsored content ads will have a follow button in the top right of them. This is something that's not available in any other objectives. So if you are interested in getting more followers to your company page, this can be a benefit of using this objective is not only the engagement you'll get, the traffic you'll get, but you also have an option. Viewers will have an option to follow your company page. So we see that you know outside of pure follower ads, this is the next best for driving additional followers for your company page. By the wording here you can tell that this campaign optimizes towards people who are most likely to engage with your ads. And that can be just social engagements such as likes and comments and shares. And those are good things to get as well. But keep in mind that's not all. People clicking to view your website engagements can be just social engagements. So you're charged on this. Anytime somebody engages with your ad in any way that it does include clicking the See more button or clicking that like button, you'll be charged for that click. If you're bidding on a CPM CPC basis, so kind of further there you can bid this one on a CPC basis so that you'll pay for only when people click or engage. And then you also have the maximum delivery option as well with this objective. I do like using these objectives. This objective for top of funnel campaigns and for retargeting campaigns. With good well designed ads I can actually get a better cost per impression than the brand awareness objectives can. And then onto the third objective in the consideration stage is the video views objective. This is great for anytime you have a video that you want to push for consumption of that video. Third, that's where the video views objective comes in handy. This will optimize towards people who are most likely to watch your video on LinkedIn, it says I want people to watch my videos. Choose this objective to share your videos with more people. Your campaign will be shown to people most likely to view your videos. I noticed that this objective does get the longest views of any of them on LinkedIn. When I compare ads side by side of different objectives, people, when you choose the objective, people watch the video the longest or it's optimizing to find the people that watches watch the videos the longest. So when you click on this objective, you will then also have options to bid on a cost per view basis. Note that LinkedIn's view is a two second view. So if somebody watches for two seconds, then that's when you're charged. But we do generally see that better costs when you do a manual bidding there bidding on cost per view versus you know, if someone just scrolling quickly by your ad, you might pay for that impression with maximum delivery. But with manual bidding here with cost review, you only pay when someone watches 2 seconds and then, you know, lots of people continue watching. Even further past that. Videos can be also good for retargeting your audience as a way to convey more information to them. You know, warm audiences, people who are in your pipeline, use videos to maybe show them a demo or share customer testimonials and stuff like that. We do often see that cold audiences do tend to watch videos less than retargeting audiences. And I think that's just LinkedIn as a platform. People don't tend to sit there and watch videos and scroll around as they do on Facebook. So we do see videos tend to perform better with warmer audiences than colder audiences. If a cold audience sees your video, you know, if they don't know anything about you yet, they're not going to sit there and watch it. Just by the nature of LinkedIn in general, people don't do that. So it's even less likely for a cold audience to do that. So if we have videos, we tend to try to stick them into the retargeting campaign. But that said, if there's a very good video that that clearly showcases a benefit or grabs someone's attention, you can see video ads perform well too. Now we're moving over to the third stage of the objective graphic here with the conversion stage. And the first one there is the lead generation objective using this objective. This is the only objective that allows use of lead forms on LinkedIn, which is a native form that can Open inside of LinkedIn, auto populate with information from the user's profile and then if the user submits that that can then be captured and sent to your CRM or places. From there, what LinkedIn says is I want more quality leads on LinkedIn. Choose this objective. To capture leads on LinkedIn, use a lead gen form pre filled with LinkedIn profile data directly integrate with a lead management platform. Your campaign will be shown to people most likely to fill out a lead generation form. So LinkedIn's going to optimize towards people who are most likely to engage and submit those forms. These forms can be used for various types of offers. They're probably most popular for content downloads, but can also be used for offers like demo requests and stuff like that. The upside is that they're a quick and easy interaction, you know, a lot smoother than somebody clicking through to go to your website and submit a form there. That's a much longer process with a lot of steps in that process that have opportunity for drop off. So this is a quick and simple interaction. So your conversion rate and your cost per lead will be, you know, your cost per lead will be a lot higher for a website visits campaign. Lead generation is usually a much cheaper cost per leads, but that said, they are going to be a lot colder of leads because they've had much less interaction with your company and they haven't been to your website yet necessarily. So that's a lead generation objective. There's several different ad types you can use with those lead forms and that's the only one that you can then attach a lead form to the ad and then that objective also does allow you to bid on a CPC basis. So you can choose to bid and only pay for each click. Also under this category are talent leads and job applicants. These are two recruiting objectives. I won't go too far into these because I know most marketers don't tend to use these, but if you are doing recruiting or like high volume recruiting on LinkedIn, these can be useful to capture more job applicants. This is another way to choose who you want to target when you run your job ad in the job ads platform on LinkedIn, you will post a job ad and it kind of goes out to everybody. So these are objectives that you can then choose to run job ads and choose who exactly sees that that job ad. While we're on the topic, there's also lots of ways to run recruiting ads on LinkedIn. You can run messaging ads, you can run sponsored content ads and drive them to recruiting websites or capture leads. So there are several ways to do recruiting campaigns on LinkedIn. I'm sure we'll talk about that in a future pod. So next on this list is the website conversions campaign. So this is like I mentioned earlier, this is driving people to a website and then with the goal of having them complete some kind of action or conversion on that website. LinkedIn says I want more purchases, registrations or downloads. Choose this objective to capture leads in your website. Drive actions that are valuable to your business. Your campaign will be shown to people most likely to take the actions you define as valuable for your business. So this is doing some kind of conversion optimization on LinkedIn's end where they're having their algorithm run and optimize towards people who are most likely to take an action. So there's a couple things to think about here is number one, your conversion tracking setup. I'm sure we'll also have an episode to go very deep diving on conversion tracking best practices. Some companies have a lot of different conversion events that they might track. So you might use website conversions objective at different stages of the funnel and maybe optimizing for different conversions. Something to watch out for here is I know some companies have a lot of conversion events that they'd like to track, including down to the page views along with form submissions and stuff like that. Be careful not to use the website conversions objective when you're tracking lots of different page views because you know the algorithm is going to optimize towards page views and you might have one demo conversion in there and it's less likely to optimize for that. So I have seen the website conversions objective perform better than website visits with high volume campaigns with large budgets. If we're driving a lot of clicks and a lot of conversions, I have seen the algorithm kick in and positively produce a better cost per conversion versus the website visits objective. But that said, website conversions are more expensive clicks on average than the website visits one. So if you have a low budget, probably start with the website visits objective and then as your budget grows or as you hone in your conversions, then maybe consider switching to website conversions. All right, so that's conversion tracking. Choose one of those and then let's hop over to the audience section next. As you move down to the audience section, you'll have. There's a few different options here. We will deep dive on audience targeting in the next episode. So right here I'm going to kind of stay pretty high level with it. To start you can choose the locations you want to target. You can also exclude certain locations. So you could do all us minus one state if you wanted to. And then next you can choose the profile language that someone's profile is set to. This is useful especially when you run international campaigns campaigns. You might want to make sure that your ad language matches up with the language that someone's profile is using. So you might have different campaigns for German ads and English ads and Japanese ads if you're running various campaigns in different parts of the world. Moving down the audience targeting attributes section, there's lots of different attributes you can Target audiences on LinkedIn with, between job titles and company sizes and industries, and then you can also exclude them by those same attributes. For the most part. Most of those can also be excluded as well. At the bottom of this section there's the Enable Audience expansion checkbox that if you've done any research on LinkedIn, most people say keep this off. And I do agree with that. LinkedIn's power comes in the specificity of their targeting. I think they kind of took a page from Facebook that Facebook Auto turns on their audience expansion as well. On Facebook, when it's more interest based targeting, it's less specifically clear who you want to target. So it's more okay to have the algorithm go find similar people based on interests. But here when we want to be very specific on who's that job title, who's that buyer at that specific type of company I want to reach, you know, 99% of the time this checkbox should be disabled. If you have a very high performing campaign and a very large audience that you can reach, maybe you would consider turning it on. But for the most part, start with that off. Next is moving down to ad format. So on LinkedIn there's lots of different ad formats that you can choose from. We'll kind of talk through these. Now the first one is the standard single image ad. So this is going to be an ad that runs the new newsfeed. This is probably LinkedIn's most popular format right in the newsfeed. It's kind of the full ad experience with an ad image, intro, text, headline and then destination URL and all that. Next up are carousel ads. This is where instead of a single image, there can be several tiles that you can have there and then each tile can have an image and some tech and a headline text there. They can Each have distinct URLs with each tile or they can all use the same URL. Third is video ad. So you can put a video right in the LinkedIn newsfeed and then that can also have a lead form on it that can direct people to a website, but you can have video Ads right in the newsfeed. Number four is text ads. These have been kind of minimized in this last year or so. They used to be right at the top of the newsfeed bar, but now they've been minimized. So they only appear in the right hand side column, only on desktop. So they're very small ad units. They don't get a ton of clicks because they're kind of out of the way. Most people don't see them and there's not much information you can convey in that small space. So they don't. They're not usually a huge driver of clicks or visits. But that said, because they are out of the way, you can get a lot of impressions for very cheaply. They're probably one of the most cheapest ad units along with spotlight ads as a way to maybe build awareness with an audience. It's a way to keep your logo in front of somebody you know that might see it pop up a lot. They might read the headline again. These don't get many clicks, but it's a way to kind of get more impressions with your audience. So next is moving to spotlight ads. And similar to text ads, these only show up in the right hand side. These ads are a little bit bigger. If you've seen any of the ads on LinkedIn that put your profile picture next to a company logo, this is the spotlight ad. They're also called dynamic ads for that reason, where it'll dynamically input the user's profile picture next to a company logo. These are often used for hiring ads because they kind of give that impression of you joining a company. But they're also very useful for various other objectives as well as they are desktop only ads. So you know that all clicks that you're going to get are on a desktop. So it's useful for software downloads. For any kind of desktop software, you don't have to have the person's profile picture fill in there. You can use a background image instead. And then you can also replace the person's name into the ad as well to make it personalized. Next is follower ad. So these are the same thing basically as spotlight ads, but you can have a click to follow button there. So if somebody clicks on that follow button, then they can. They'll be directed to your company page and automatically follow your company page. So if followers are important, and we often do find these perform well for higher funnel audiences as a way to get people to follow your page. And then once they follow your page, then they'll continue seeing updates from your page in the future. Number seven is a document ad. Document ads are a way to upload documents right to LinkedIn and put them right in the newsfeed in front of people. So you can put PowerPoints and PDFs and stuff like that right in the newsfeed. So these are useful for, you know, if you are running any kind of lead magnet campaigns, the question's always how many people are actually reading that lead magnet. So you can, if somebody opts in, maybe you put one of your reports or something right in the newsfeed to retarget those people to help improve consumption. So we know we want people to be reading these PDFs in lead magnets that we might be creating. So maybe we retarget that audience to put the document right in front of them, right there in the news feed. And this document ad can either be a direct to download the document or it can be attached to a lead form. So if it's direct to download, they can click a button to download the document right there from the newsfeed or they can click the button and then it pops up a lead form to get the rest of the document there. Next is conversation ad. These are replacing message ads on LinkedIn. Message ads have been around for a long time, which would be the ads that show up in your inbox. Conversation ads are the next iteration of that. Conversation ads are a little bit more advanced, but they, they appear in your inbox on LinkedIn and they will appear to come from a person, not, not just a company. So it'll be attached to a person's profile. You'll see their name, their headline. These are an ad format. It will say sponsored in the inbox and then from there you'll see the initial message and then there'll be a couple different bubbles and then. And in the ad you can build a chat tree. So you can have. It's almost like a choose your adventure. People can select from a couple different options and then you can define what are those follow up messages or links that are sent with a conversation ad. And you can direct people, you know through a series of messages. You can direct them to a website and then clicking can also open a lead form to submit a lead through that as well. They are a very interesting interactive experience. They're good, they are expensive because you're paying for every send there. But for the right type of offer they can be effective. And then lastly, our event ads. So of course on LinkedIn you can run events. On LinkedIn the event ad is the Official ad format to have somebody click to attend your event and it pulls the information from your event right into the ad. You can add some more intro text there and then that's how you can promote events with the event ad. So those are the ad formats. Next we'll move down to placements. If you've selected any of the ad objectives that are clicking to a website. So basically all objectives except for the Legion objective and the jobs objective, then you'll have the audience. The option here to check, check the LinkedIn Audience Network. Now, the LinkedIn Audience Network, or the LAN as it's called, is putting LinkedIn ads on third party websites. So if someone navigates to like the Wall Street Journal, for example, they might see ads on the Wall Street Journal that are actually LinkedIn ads going through the LinkedIn audience network. So it's a way to kind of get more reach from your ads. They are kind of more simplified ad units. You know, it's someone, it's an ad showing up on another website, it's less clear what company is advertising it. And the display is a bit different than the newsfeed ads. So they tend to have mixed results. It's. I would not recommend them for top of funnel or cold ads. Stick to LinkedIn for that. But they can work, they can be more beneficial for retargeting audiences. Once someone's already familiar with your company and your branding, maybe use those to make sure your ads are staying in front of them outside of just LinkedIn. And you might consider is your, is your audience on LinkedIn.com all the time? Or you know, are they on the Internet but maybe just not on LinkedIn very often. So how digitally active is your audience? So if they're not on LinkedIn but you think they're online, then maybe you'd have to use the LinkedIn Audience Network to reach them when they're not on LinkedIn but online. All right, moving down to budget and schedule section. This is where you can choose from a few different options. You can set a daily budget, you can set a lifetime budget, or you can set both a daily and a lifetime budget. So daily budgets is setting I want to spend X amount per day. Lifetime is I want to spend X amount over the course of this whole campaign. And then once I hit that lifetime budget, then turn my campaign off and then set both daily and lifetime budget. So every day I'm setting a certain amount and then lifetime, if I hit that lifetime, then it stops. So the different use cases for each, I'd say most, most of the time, I'm using the daily budget, the simplest and most straightforward. But sometimes we have like a specific ad wave where, you know, they might budget just 5k for a single ad wave. So I'll just set that and then let it run. Next, we can choose a schedule. You can choose a start date. So maybe you're setting up your campaign and you want to actually start it over the weekend when you're not in the office. Or maybe you want to schedule to start next month. You can choose a specific start date for your campaign. Once your campaign launches, that kind of gets set in stone. So you can't pause and then restart at a set date. So you can only launch on a set date. And then you can also choose an end date. So if you want your campaign to run, say through the end of the month, you can choose the end date or maybe a certain date. You just choose your campaign to campaign to turn off. Then next is moving down to bidding. First you have optimization goal. By default, this is going to be set to whatever the note to match with the objective is that you've set. And that's typically optimizing for, like, landing page clicks. If you're choosing the visits objective or impressions or reach for the awareness objective or leads for the lead generation objective. So that's the optimization goal. By default, it's selecting the right one. You can for most of the objectives, you can change it to impressions, but I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. Next is bidding strategy. And there's typically three different ways to bid on LinkedIn. Number one is the default maximum delivery, where LinkedIn's going to push to spend your full budget every day. That's kind of like handing the keys over to LinkedIn and saying, here's my budget, go spend that every day. Now, under the hood, automatic bidding is actually a CPM bid. So if you have a very high engagement rate on your ad, this can be advantageous. It can be a cost benefit to bid with maximum delivery, but if you have low CTRs or low engagement rates, you know, LinkedIn is very good at spending the full budget every day, so we can see that that will often make you overpay for impressions if you don't have a high engagement rate. Next, I'll jump to the manual bidding option on LinkedIn here. So for different campaign objectives, you can choose to bid by the action. So, like website visits, I can bid for every click to my website for engagement objective. I can bid for each engagement. For lead gen, I can bid by clicks. So some of them allow manual bidding. This is where you set a certain bid amount and you tell LinkedIn I'm not willing to pay more than this bid amount. Though keep in mind LinkedIn can bid up to 45% more than that than your, than your bid that you set there. That we do find that this is the best way to control your costs on LinkedIn because LinkedIn does have very expensive audiences and it also has enterprise companies that pay a lot of money or have large ad budgets. So if you just do maximum delivery, you're kind of throwing your ads into the auction there with, with those big companies and those expensive audiences. Manual bidding is a way to take control of that and say I'm only willing to bid up to this certain amount. And especially for a smaller budget, we recommend manual bidding to keep your cost controls under control. Now thirdly is the middle option here, cost cap. LinkedIn seems to be suggesting this a lot more recently and cost cap is actually an interesting blend in the middle here where it's actually an impression bid. But you're telling LinkedIn I want to try to stay within a certain result amount. Uh, I've noticed it's not good with good at staying within that specific result amount. But it does help rein in your costs better than maximum delivery does. So on LinkedIn if your CTR, if your click through rate or engagement rate is over about 1%, that's where maximum delivery does tend to be more cost efficient versus manual bidding. Because manual bidding, you're, you're saying I want to pay for every click like this, but if I bid on impressions and I have a high engagement rate, then I'm going to get more clicks for my same budget cost cap. I've actually seen be a better version of that where I wanna, it's an impression bid, but it does tell LinkedIn to kind of focus on the cheaper ones or the cheaper cost first. So last section here is conversion tracking. So if you've set up any conversion events in LinkedIn, you have the option to attach them to your campaign. Here you can see you can check multiple conversions, you can check just one. If you're using the website conversions objective, you have to check it, select a conversion. If you're not using that, you don't have to check a conversion here and then in this box it'll show you if signals have been received recently. If that's been detected, you can create new conversions from this view and more. Conversion tracking is a deep topic so we'll definitely have a pod going way deeper on conversion tracking best practices in a later pod. All right, so that's the campaign Setup screens. So once you click Next on the screen, you'll be taken to the Ads Setup screen. And then on the Ad setup screen, you can choose to create new ads or browse existing content. Creating new ads obviously creates new ad units. Browsing existing content allows you to boost company page posts or choose ads that have already been created in another campaign, where it can then be the same ad unit. The benefit of that is you can aggregate more social proof on the same ad, but the downside is that uses the same URL, so it limits your tracking abilities in that way. We'll have a whole pod on Ad Creative best practices and everything. So for this pod, we're going to go ahead and hit next and then get to the Review and Launch screen. This screen summarizes all the settings you set for your campaign here. Kind of a good last pass to make sure everything is all set up as you intend it to be. And then from there you click Launch Campaign button. And then you're off the ground and running from there. So hope you enjoyed this walkthrough and few other episodes. We'll definitely dive into Ad Creative. We'll dive into audience targeting even more, but those are gonna be their own podcast. So that's the end of the Quick Start Guide. I'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.